# Introduction

This programmers manual describes Mini-XML version 2.9, a small XML parsing library that you can use to read and write XML data files in your C and C++ applications.

Mini-XML was initially developed for the Gutenprint project to replace the rather large and unwieldy `libxml2` library with something substantially smaller and easier-to-use. It all began one morning in June of 2003 when Robert posted the following sentence to the developer's list:

> It's bad enough that we require libxml2, but rolling our own XML parser is a bit more than we can handle.

I then replied with:

> Given the limited scope of what you use in XML, it should be trivial to code a mini-XML API in a few hundred lines of code.

I took my own challenge and coded furiously for two days to produced the initial public release of Mini-XML, total lines of code: 696. Robert promptly integrated Mini-XML into Gutenprint and removed libxml2.

Thanks to lots of feedback and support from various developers, Mini-XML has evolved since then to provide a more complete XML implementation and now stands at a whopping 3,792 lines of code, compared to 140,410 lines of code for libxml2 version 2.9.1.

Aside from Gutenprint, Mini-XML is used for the following projects/software applications:

- CUPS
- ZynAddSubFX

Please file a bug on msweet.org if you would like your project added or removed from this list, or if you have any comments/quotes you would like me to publish about your experiences with Mini-XML.

## Organization of This Document

This manual is organized into the following chapters and appendices:

- Chapter 1, "Building, Installing, and Packaging Mini-XML", provides compilation, installation, and packaging instructions for Mini-XML.
- Chapter 2, "Getting Started with Mini-XML", shows how to use the Mini-XML library in your programs.
- Chapter 3, "More Mini-XML Programming Techniques", shows additional ways to use the Mini-XML library.
- Chapter 4, "Using the mxmldoc Utility", describes how to use the `mxmldoc(1)` program to generate software documentation.
- Appendix A, "Mini-XML License", provides the terms and conditions for using and distributing Mini-XML.
- Appendix B, "Release Notes", lists the changes in each release of Mini-XML.
- Appendix C, "Library Reference", contains a complete reference for Mini-XML, generated by `mxmldoc`.
- Appendix D, "XML Schema", shows the XML schema used for the XML files produced by `mxmldoc`.

## Notation Conventions

Various font and syntax conventions are used in this guide. Examples and their meanings and uses are explained below:

`mxmldoc`
`mxmldoc(1)`
  The names of commands; the first mention of a command or function in a chapter is followed by a manual page section number.
/var
/etc/hosts
  File and directory names.
`Request ID is Printer-123`
  Screen output.
`lp -d printer filename ENTER`
  Literal user input; special keys like `ENTER` are in ALL CAPS.
12.3
  Numbers in the text are written using the period (.) to indicate the decimal point.

## Abbreviations

The following abbreviations are used throughout this manual:

Gb
  Gigabytes, or 1073741824 bytes
kb
  Kilobytes, or 1024 bytes
Mb
  Megabytes, or 1048576 bytes
UTF-8, UTF-16
  Unicode Transformation Format, 8-bit or 16-bit
W3C
  World Wide Web Consortium
XML
  Extensible Markup Language

## Other References

The Unicode Standard, Version 4.0, Addison-Wesley, ISBN 0-321-18578-1
  The definition of the Unicode character set which is used for XML.
Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 (Third Edition)
  The XML specification from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)

## Legal Stuff

The Mini-XML library is copyright 2003-2014 by Michael R Sweet. License terms are described in Appendix A - Mini-XML License.